The present disclosure relates generally to managing legal documents, and, in particular, to a system and method for electronically managing discovery pleading information.
Legal matters often involve large volumes of information that must be organized and categorized in response to particular inquires or issues, such as litigation pleadings, business transactions, government regulations, and other legal matters. The information is typically managed by a centralized organization, such as a legal department or group therein having document coordinators. Managing this legal information often requires organizing both textual pleading information as well as discovery documents produced in response to discovery requests associated with the pleadings.
Existing methods for managing pleading information often result in inconsistent responses across similar discovery requests. Although current litigation support systems may support the storage of historical pleading textual information and produced document information, they do not provide a link between these two repositories. This is especially true when a link is sought on an enterprise basis (i.e., the ability to compare responses in different cases or matters). Typically, pleading textual information is stored in one repository and produced document information is stored in a separate repository. There is no automated method of determining the documents that were produced in response to a discovery request associated with a particular pleading. A document coordinator must keep track of the produced documents and tie them to one or more pleadings. An attorney responding to a new discovery request does not have visibility to previous pleadings that contain similar discovery requests nor does the attorney have visibility to documents that were produced in response to similar discovery requests. This can occur both for pleadings in the same case or matter as well as for similar pleadings in different cases or matters that involve similar issues. The attorney can attempt to get this information from the document coordinators but this can be time consuming and hit or miss because the document coordinator may track tens of thousands of discovery requests and corresponding produced document information. This does not result in a high level of confidence in the ability to accurately and consistently respond to similar pleadings and discovery requests.
Inconsistent responses across similar discovery requests may result in claims of intentionally incomplete or inaccurate responses. Inconsistent responses involve both the textual responses to discovery pleadings as well as the documents and other information produced in response to the discovery request. Thus, it is desirable for a litigation support system to provide consistency in textual and production responses by allowing the storage and retrieval of historical pleading textual information and produced document information. This consistency needs to exist both within a specific case or matter, as well as across different cases or matters involving similar issues. Ideally, to ensure the greatest level of consistency and accuracy in litigation responses, it would be desirable if the system could link the historical pleading textual information and the produced document information.